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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 14 No 2 (April 2020)
No one saw the gorilla. I smiled and looked at my new group of students for the day: these were a selection of some of the most elite real estate agents in the world. These awesome folks reign supreme over Los Angeles’ competitive (and very fun) housing and land market. From Beverly Hills to the Hollywood Hills, these are the absolute best of the best – the people who sell land and homes to everyone from Oscar-winning Hollywood megastars to billionaire Silicon Valley tycoons.
The head of the Beverly Hills branch invited me to teach her employees my unique method of manifesting to her team as an early Christmas present. She had transformed her business using my method. In front of me now sat her team, a large group of people who already have had massive successes through being able to perceive opportunities where most could not… and yet, I was the only person who saw the gorilla.
The “gorilla” video, commonly used in science classrooms, is known as “The Monkey Business Illusion” (and you can find one on my website roycechristyn.com or click here). In the video, a group of about seven or eight young people are throwing basketballs to each other. I instructed my class to count how many times a ball is passed from one player to another.
The clip finished, and I asked the group one thing: “Who saw the gorilla?”
They looked at me like I had three heads. The suggestion that this group had not seen a gorilla in the video – let alone a man in a gorilla costume who walks into the middle of a group of people passing basketballs, stops, then does a silly dance before exiting the frame – was not sitting well with this particular class. It is their business to see opportunities where most cannot – that’s how they make their money.
Yet, not one of them saw the gorilla walk through the video. The class was so focused on counting the number of basketball passes, their brains literally did not allow them to see what seems like the most obvious thing to happen in the video! I replayed the clip, and the gasps in this very-full room made me smile even more.
One student, who I’ll call Mary, was feeling really upset with herself for not seeing the gorilla. She was new to this elite world of million-dollar sales, and I asked her what her biggest goal was for 2020. She told me she wanted to meet someone, a new client, and sell a home worth 10 million dollars. I told her to hang in there and buckle up because I knew once she started applying what I teach, she would manifest this easily. She just needed to open her mind (just like you are opening your mind now) and learn how amazing our abilities of perception truly are — and what they mean when it comes to creating the life you want.
Here’s the only “secret”: If you don’t understand the science of perception, you might as well not even try the Law of Attraction or manifesting things into your life.
I don’t need you to buy my new book Scripting the Life You Want. I am not going to dangle a promise of something hidden in its pages that you can only learn when you buy my book. I’m not a fan of authors who promise the world in articles, only to have fans buy the book and not get much out of it. I’ve decided I’m just going to give you the good stuff so you can see how incredibly powerful and potent scripting can be for you in your life right now.
I’m only going to be able to give you the “meat,” and if you want the bones and muscle, you really want to read the book. But, I know how well this works and how you don’t need all of the details. I’ve used my scripting to manifest a lead guest-starring role on Disney Channel’s sitcom “Wizards of Waverly Place” playing Selena Gomez’s boyfriend, to making incredible amounts of money, to finding my soulmate.
No need for you to buy copies of my book, and no sales pitch from me. Just promise yourself you will try my little method out for a few weeks. Deal? Cool. Let’s do this.
STEP ONE
First, I want you to get two separate notebooks or something to write in that you can keep “individual” (a smart tablet is cool, too). In one notebook you are going to label the cover “Scripting the Life You Want,” and on the other notebook you will label “Journal.”
STEP TWO: Daily Want List
I’m going to let you in on a little mind-body-spirit truth that a lot of teachers are scared to admit to our students: we want you to be selfish. Before you say “What the heck, Royce?!”, hear me out and ask yourself if you have an open mind to reconsidering the idea of “selfishness.”
Michael Jordan, still considered one of the all-time greats of basketball, said one of my favourite quotes ever about being selfish: “To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don’t isolate.” See what he said there? That’s the key. You have to be selfish enough to reach and achieve your goals and dreams so that you can then use the good you have acquired in your life to spread to others. This means you need to be bold and write down what you want.
So, for the next few weeks, you are going to write a super short want list (starting each desire with “I intend”) of 3-7 things you want. It should look like this:
1. I intend to have an awesome day.
2. I intend to receive unexpected money this week in a fun and exciting way.
3. I intend to own a Tesla.
And… I’m going to give you my most powerful intention that bring my students’ results up from a 50% success rate to 90%+ – just by including this simple intention/want in your daily list:
4. I intend to be a master manifestor.
You have to think outside the box when it comes to not only the Law of Attraction, and sometimes the most obvious thing is a huge key. You want to master manifesting and creating things in your life? Put it on the want list. Trust me.
Feel free to mix up your wants daily or keep them the same – just have fun with it (it’s more important than most know) and don’t ritualise it by getting into a rut and writing the same stuff every day. That’s where my next secret sauce to scripting comes in.
STEP THREE: The Belief List, or… Let’s get… mundane?
On the next blank page in your Scripting notebook, pick two or three items from your Daily Want List that you believe or know the most are going to happen. They can be boring. That’s kind of the point. You are re-coding and training your brain with this. So, it would look like:
1. I know today is an awesome day.
2. I believe that I easily own a Tesla.
In my book, I talk about something I call “the magic of the mundane.” Every once in a while a friend or someone I am coaching will come to me feeling stuck with their manifestations after having had wonderful initial success. Every single time, without fail, the reason they have stopped having manifestations appear is because of one simple thing: they aren’t writing things they consider “boring” or “trivial” on their Want List, Belief List, and/or Daily Script.
My partner Solly’s best friend had hit a wall with her manifesting work. She called me, upset and angry at the universe. She asked me what she could to do to turn things around because, despite some initial success, her manifestations had come to a complete stop.
“When is your next checkup appointment with your dentist?” I asked her, dead serious.
After I assured her that I wasn’t joking, she told me that her next appointment happened to be the following week. “Great!” I said. “Tell me about other normal stuff you’re doing over the course of the next few days,” which she did.
“Awesome! Starting tomorrow morning, when you’re writing your Want List, you are going to write at least two intentions relating to your dental appointment, and a few more that are about your dinner with your parents and your weekly grocery shopping. Make them things you know will happen. For example, write down that you intend to have an easy dental appointment, that you intend to buy those special organic apples you love, and that you know you will enjoy spending time with your parents’ dog when you have dinner at their house.”
I advised her to think of these “mundane” intentions as flexible items on her list that are in addition to the “big dream” intentions she had been writing. By flexible, I meant she could add more intentions of things she knows will almost absolutely happen over the coming days and weeks, and she could swap out having an easy time at the dentist’s and perhaps intend to get a free sample of toothpaste instead (since her dentist always gives her one). She still thought I had lost it, and I told her to trust me and call me in a week.
When she called, not only had the obvious things we talked about (like buying the apples) manifested into her reality, but she told me how she also was asked out on a date while she was grocery shopping! Not only that, but a management position at her company opened up suddenly, and her boss asked her to come in to interview for the job, which would include a small raise.
So what happened? How did writing things down that she knew would happen already help “unstick” the manifestation of other, more exciting things on her Want List? There is actually some really cool science to help us understand.
Perception is Key
Remember the video we talked about earlier? My wonderful group of students’ brains were not allowing them to perceive a man in a gorilla costume walking into a 45-second video of kids tossing balls back and forth to one another. Why were their brains – the brains of some of the wealthiest and most successful businesspeople in LA – missing something so obvious? As I discuss in my book, my process of Scripting allows us to interact with someone – ourselves – and alter the reality of our world. As discoveries in science and technology are made, I am always fascinated to see if they can help explain how seemingly otherworldly tools like scripting operate.
Donald Hoffman, a professor and cognitive scientist from the University of California, Irvine, presented a TED talk in 2015 laying out what he and his many research students had discovered. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, and I believe his discoveries may hold the “key to the key” that unlocks the door to understanding manifesting. In his twenty-minute talk, he takes the audience on an incredible journey that leads to one pretty astounding conclusion: evolution does not favour reality. Put another way: as we have evolved, our evolution has not made our perception of reality anywhere close to a priority.
Why did my students not see the gorilla, and why did writing about mundane things help “unstick” my friends’ manifestations? The answers can be found in our brain stem’s reticular formation. Let’s focus on just one aspect of your reticular formation for now: the extrathalamic control modulatory system, which you may have heard called the reticular activating system (RAS) by positive-thinking leaders such as Mel Robbins. I call it your ExtraCOM system, because it is a powerful tool of “Extra COMMunication” that we use to manifest in our lives.
Your RAS is a major key to manifestation and the Law of Attraction.
In a fascinating article titled “How Your Brain’s Reticular Activating System (RAS) Determines Your Success,” author Akshay Gupta explains how our reticular activating system acts like a filter for the billions of pieces of information that are being flung at our senses daily. He writes:
“It helps to think of the reticular activating system (RAS) as a gatekeeper of your brain. Its job is to sort through the massive amounts of information delivered to you by your sensory organs. Some of these stimulations always get through, for example hearing your name called. However, there is information that your brain can do without and the RAS makes the decision to dismiss it. Basically, the RAS lets in information that you are already focused on.”
Have you ever heard someone mention a somewhat uncommon word to you, like Windsor, or have you ever casually noticed a number, like 11:11, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, you start seeing the word Windsor and the number 11:11 almost everywhere? Contrary to superstition, this is actually your RAS at work! When you experience this, you are experiencing what is known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Why does this matter when we are talking about a list of intentions, desires, and beliefs? Well, our RAS is a filter that is programmed.
I like to think of our brain as a computer that can be programmed with great apps and software… or infected with viruses that need cleaning. The good thing is that both of these are possible: programming and cleaning. My personal method of scripting reprograms your mental computer to clean and re-focus your brain’s filter.
Mel Robbins (who was the first person I had ever heard discuss the RAS) explained it best:
“[G]uess who programmed that filter? You did! And so did the people from your past. And so if you constantly feel like you’re unlovable, guess what? Your reticular activating system is going through the day and it is going to point out every single piece of evidence that confirms that negative belief that you have. If you think that people don’t like you at work, the Reticular Activating System, the filter, it is literally going to be looking for evidence to confirm that belief all day long.”
Our RAS is focused on two main things – how important the information it’s receiving is to our immediate survival and how important something is to us because we keep telling it to focus on something. The good news is that you have the power to easily and gradually reprogram your RAS. I know from personal experience that it is just as crucial to give our RAS feedback and written instructions… which is why writing down seemingly mundane things (that you know are going to happen) on your Daily Want List is so important. When the mundane things manifest in your reality, your RAS begins to make new synapses and connections regarding your Daily Want List and reality. Your brain’s RAS immediately begins to understand and “think” two things:
1. “When something goes onto this list, it is likely to happen in real life.”
2. “I better start pointing this stuff out.”
This is where we have some fun “hacking our brain” using my process of scripting.
STEP FOUR: Scripting the Life You Want
In the morning, right after you wake up and write your few wants and belief list, turn to a blank page. Date the top of the paper so that it reads the current day. I like to write it as “Today was Friday, May 1st, 2020” – putting the “was” there subtly reinforces to our mind that we are now writing out a script (aka future journal entry) as if we are snuggled up in our bed writing our normal nightly journal entry about what happened during the day (even though it hasn’t yet).
Yes, it may feel a little funny at first, but just write out your day from the end of the day. Start talking about how you woke up, and (this is important) write out in the first sentence or two something like “I sat down to write my morning script, and afterwards…” and go from there, focusing ONLY on the positive aspects you want to experience during the coming day, but not shying away from the boring appointments or errands you do have on your schedule.
The Last Step
At the actual end of each night, take out that other notebook labelled “Journal” we talked about, and write out what actually happened during your day. This is your “control” in your scripting experiment. This keeps you honest and also will be the notebook that freaks you out the most because of what happens after a few days and weeks (this all works really fast).
What happens? Within a short period of time, if you take a look at your morning script and your nighttime journal from the previous days, something almost eerie has happened: you can no longer tell the difference between what you wrote in the morning and what you wrote at night. They are indistinguishable from one another.
Mind-Body-Spirit-Science
It’s actually easy and fun – and there is real science to help us take manifesting to new levels. Welcome to the new world of Mind-Body-Spirit. And, if I may, please allow me to introduce the 4th component for this new decade and century: science. We have finally found the bridge, and that is the most exciting development in the world of self-development we’ve had in over a century.
Remember Mary, the real estate agent that we talked about who wanted to make her first $10,000,000.00 sale? Well, nine days after she started doing her scripting, she noticed a sign outside a bookstore near her office advertising a well-known entrepreneur’s book signing event. She was a big fan of this guy’s TV appearances, so she walked in to meet this well-known fellow.
As it turned out, this author and Mary got talking and he had a house to sell but hadn’t found the right realtor yet. He wanted to sell the house for $11 million dollars. Mary got her first big client and, within two months, her first sale over $10 million! When she called me to tell me, she said that the weirdest thing was that, according to her new client, there had been signs advertising his signing outside the shop for weeks.
She passed by this shop every day on her way to work – it was like the gorilla! Her brain was so busy before she learned how to script that she almost missed meeting him. Her brain didn’t have the right instructions! Scripting helped her quickly and easily train her brain into pointing out to her an opportunity to manifest her wish that had been right in front of her the entire time!
“There are ‘gorillas’ everywhere” she told me – and she is right.
You also have “gorillas” (aka all sorts of manifestations) all around you, you just haven’t told your mind to point them out to you! Now you are forever changed because you have the tools to start receiving your dreams. Remember to be playful and have fun! Got it? Yeah you do! Now, go make some awesome scripts and find some gorillas. They’ve been there the entire time, only now you can finally see them like I did that crisp December day in Beverly Hills.
If you’ve tasted the meat and are now ready for the muscles and bones, Royce Christyn’s book Scripting the Life You Want: Manifest Your Dreams with Just Pen and Paper will help set you on course to seeing the gorillas and manifesting your intentions. With a Foreword by New Thought master and practitioner Mitch Horowitz, Scripting the Life You Want is available from all good bookstores.
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